Why is it we all assume the turbolifts can only travel vertically or horizontally.

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"I think mainly because the turboshaft network is portrayed as perfectly rectangular in graphics from ST:TMP on."

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Well, according to Decker it's "a totally new Enterprise" and for whatever reasons they decided to do a rectangular turboshaft system on the new one, doesn't necessarily have to reflect on Kirk's previous Enterprise.

"And a turboshaft following the contours of the connecting neck would indeed make a lot of sense. Although the rows of windows there place rather strict limitations on that, and would better match the idea of a perfectly vertical shaft just ahead of the vertical stack of windows. Otherwise, there would be very little space between a window and the turboshaft."

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I apologize if I appear unable to follow you, but any connection between the location of the neck windows and the position of the turboshaft is entirely conjectural, isn't it?

Add to this that any vertical turboshaft would be cutting an already confined space into two. Again a diagonal shaft at the bow of the neck, would allow you to make the most of whatever little space there is to start with (bowling alley?). According to this studio set blueprint from Season Two (and Three)

the only place there would be for a vertical turboshaft connecting straight to the bridge would be at the end of the corridor opposed to the door of engineering. How many times did we actually see this door (near the Jefferies tube) to be a turbolift?

Instead we have seen turbolifts near the transporter room and at both ends of the circular corridor which usually carry our protagonists straight to the bridge without any horizontal movement.

Wouldn't these rather and strongly suggest a diagonal turboshaft where the turbo shaft doors at the corridor ends either open to port or starboard while the transporter room one opens to the bow of the ship?

However, this doesn't cover all the bases, especially the ones where nobody gives a voice command. OTOH, the handle doesn't appear to be a convenient selector for complex orders such as "as close to Cabin 7G221 as possible" or "Deck 16, forward port station". Perhaps the system is smarter than we give it credit for? Perhaps the turbolifts run on regular, predictable routes like a bus, unless you specify a destination, and the handles are for activating or overriding the bus functionality.

Timo Saloniemi

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I always figured that the turbolifts automatically took one to the the most direct course, based onthe information given. For example, if one says, "deck 5," the lift would stop at the closest lift station on deck 5 from where it started - taking into account maneuvering around other lift cars and such (which I still insist share shafts. At least some of the shafts could be made for larger traffic.) However, if you say "sickbay," or "transporter room 4," or "Dr. Noel's quarters", it will take you to the closest station to that location.

any connection between the location of the neck windows and the position of the turboshaft is entirely conjectural, isn't it?

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Certainly. But see below.

Add to this that any vertical turboshaft would be cutting an already confined space into two.

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Which might be a positive thing. After all, the spaces would be of an awkward shape to start out with. Dividing them into forward and aft halves, each directly accessed by the lift, would give more useful shapes. An angled passage along the leading or trailing edge could be dedicated to a stairway, then, as those need to be angled and no gravitic trickery would be needed for that in this particular case.

There is just one place in the neck where a vertical shaft can run straight the whole distance, and it happens to be the area where there are no windows, either. That is, it would be just ahead of the stack of three lit windows in the "Mirror, Mirror" capture.

without any horizontal movement

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I rather doubt we can establish anything from the direction or speed of those lights flashing by, except that the lift is moving when the lights flash. Any correlation with direction or speed seems haphazard at best. Certainly a diagonal "express shaft" would seem to run contrary to the idea of the lights being shaft wall lights visible through lift cab "windows", as the cab would have to rotate from the shaft angle to the deck angle whenever our heroes enter or exit, yet the lights do not reveal any rotation.

From season 2 onwards, we started seeing horizontal lights as well as vertical ones through the turbolift "window". Personally, I don't think that this truly IS a window, since the number of lights that pass in any given journey is very inconsistent even for similar journeys. More likely, it is simply a visual display for the occupants to give a vague indication of which direction the lift is headed. In s1 this is just up or down, but from s2 a hardware upgrade (in-universe) allowed the display to be slightly more informative, showing the occupants if they were travelling horizontally too.

"Certainly a diagonal "express shaft" would seem to run contrary to the idea of the lights being shaft wall lights visible through lift cab "windows", as the cab would have to rotate from the shaft angle to the deck angle whenever our heroes enter or exit, yet the lights do not reveal any rotation."

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No, not necessarily. The lights in a diagonal shaft (in which the turbolift cabin is of course keeping a vertical position!) are parallel to the deck level. If you take the standard situation (turbolift cabin interior, turbolift door the right) you can step out in the direction of the bridge / the ship is moving towards in the saucer section and the engineering hull. Also if our protagonists exit the turbolift towards the starboard side of the ship (end of circular corridor) the rotation doesn't have to reveal a red turbolift door where the turboshaft lights should be.

While at first sight the idea of the cabin windows just being flat screen panels appears interesting, I think they would put it to better use by displaying a ship's schematic that tells the user where he or she is (compare TMP). Which reminds me that obviously they did change the turbolift structure in TMP, otherwise Admiral Kirk wouldn't have asked where to find a certain turbolift after he got lost.

And regarding the size of the turboshafts (no, I'm not thinking of the Earth Spacedock turboshaft from ST V) I'd like to remind that in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" we saw a definitely rectangular turbolift-box that seemed big enough to also have enough space for a stretcher.
So we might be looking at various turbolift cabins, too - small or big - especially since we have never seen the inside of a TOS turboshaft.

The lights in a diagonal shaft (in which the turbolift cabin is of course keeping a vertical position!)

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But that would mean both that the lights would go past the windows diagonally in the general case, and that the shaft would have to be wider than the turbolift is. The first would be contrary to evidence (or indicate complex rotations for no obvious purpose other than hide the angle of the lights passing), the second would simply be inconvenient. We know that tiny spaces such as shuttlecraft can easily be provided with gravity independent of outside gravity or accelerations; tilting the turbolift would be a possible solution, then, and it would definitely be a sensible solution.

Indeed, it would make some sense to have the lift tilt to horizontal as soon as it departed a station, any station - the shaft could then be of a smaller cross section and consume less precious inboard volume. But admittedly the TOS lift cabs do not diverge all that much from spherical, unless there is major machinery atop or below that we are unaware of. Tilting of this sort might not create much of an advantage, then.

I think they would put it to better use by displaying a ship's schematic that tells the user where he or she is (compare TMP).

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One might indeed speculate that the lift panels have this very function - but that the function is hidden for aesthetic reasons, just like the interfaces on Enterprise-D corridors remain dark until called forth. By the time we joined Kirk and his crew, these people would be so thoroughly familiar with their own ship that they would never call forth the shaft network map.

So we might be looking at various turbolift cabins, too - small or big - especially since we have never seen the inside of a TOS turboshaft.

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Again strongly agreed. The more diversity in the range of cabins, the farther we get from the limiting idea that the lift system resembles those of today, and the closer we get to the idea that the ship has internal "roads" along which various "vehicles" travel.

No doubt there could exist a dedicated ambulance cab that not only accommodates stretchers (horizontal or vertical) but also provides various medical support services to keep the patient(s) alive till they reach sickbay. I could also see the need for fairly small logistics cabs that deliver objects down to the size of document folders or food trays; these just happen to exit the network through different, dedicated smaller hatches. As for shaft size, it might be optimized so that two (Or three? See ST5) "standard" turbolifts could just barely pass, while special vehicles would take up more room and shove other traffic aside.

...Essentially, the shaft network would be much like what we see in Wall-E, with robotic servants of all sorts moving back and forth (and up and down and sideways). Only a tad more orderly and subdued, as this is a heavy cruiser rather than a pleasure cruiser.

The lights in a diagonal shaft (in which the turbolift cabin is of course keeping a vertical position!)

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But that would mean both that the lights would go past the windows diagonally in the general case, and that the shaft would have to be wider than the turbolift is. The first would be contrary to evidence (or indicate complex rotations for no obvious purpose other than hide the angle of the lights passing), the second would simply be inconvenient. We know that tiny spaces such as shuttlecraft can easily be provided with gravity independent of outside gravity or accelerations; tilting the turbolift would be a possible solution, then, and it would definitely be a sensible solution."

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No, it would not mean that the lights would go past the windows diagonally.
Print out a sheet with parallel, thick and wide horizontal lines (that correspond to / are in allignment with the deck levels). Take a smaller sheet, fold it and cut the "turbolift" window out. Place the "turbolift cabin" in the bottom left and start moving it diagonally over your sheet with the lines (turboshaft lights) to the top right. All you'd see from the cabin's inside are turboshaft lights that (seem to) go down vertically.

Especially in the connecting neck section a bigger turboshaft could make sense to accomodate freight cars, taking materials from the storage holds at the bottom of the engineering hull up to the saucer section. That doesn't imply that all turboshafts are as big as the one running diagonally through the "neck".

I think it would rather have the function of a "spine" from which smaller turboshafts for passenger cabins spring like the "ribs" in our bodies.

Oh, I understand my mistake now - I was envisioning spot-type lights rather than wide bands in the shaft.

Yes, a system with larger trunk lines and smaller branches makes sense. But aboard a starship, space would be at a premium, so the extent to which the large "spine" helped might be limited. Rather, traffic loads might be handled chiefly by using one-way lanes in a multiply redundant network - say, the lifts would circle the saucer clockwise at a certain radius, counterclockwise at another.

The ST5:TFF vertical shaft I could easily see as a "grand trunk" going up the spine, with the top end somewhere near the impulse engines and the bottom at the cargo levels. Perhaps not a turboshaft as such, but rather a generic utility lane that accommodates lifts but also various other kinds of hovercart or container.

But it could also simply be an empty space left by the refit that replaced the TMP-style thin vertical warp core with the thicker thing seen in ST6:TUC, with the actual turboshaft being elsewhere. After all, this shaft we see has no doors for any of the in-between levels, making it pretty useless for moving personnel, and doesn't really show any turbolift-compatible side branches for the top and bottom levels, either.

"The ST5:TFF vertical shaft I could easily see as a "grand trunk" going up the spine..."

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I vaguely seem to remember having read somewhere that this shaft with 74 deck levels supposedly was a turboshaft of Earth Spacedock and that the climbing action was originally supposed to take place there (and not on location in Yosemite National Park).
When they changed the script they already had the turboshaft set and decided to somehow still use it in the film.

Hmm... Some fans have offered the cutesy theory that the E-A, a piece of junk, was patched together from other pieces of junk, including starbase turboshafts. Perhaps that's where the idea comes from?

I don't see how a starbase would fit any variant of the storyline, though, as the overall emphasis is so heavily on putting Kirk back in the TOS context of being alone with his Maker in the depths of space...

Dudes, your knowledge of the Enterprise layout, Turbolifts, etc is admirable, but whether the lifts go up and down, or across and diagonally, is no help at all in answering the original query.

So why is there never a queue for the turbolift ?

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Alright then, when the senior officers of the Enterprise need a turbolift ride all other personnel has to wait in line before it's their turn (so there are many queues all over the ship except we have never seen those). If they have a problem with that they can walk or use the vertical ladders. Senior officers' privilege.

I'm not sure why there should be a queue at the turbolift. I mean, these people are supposedly moving fairly predictably - "commuting" to their workstations for each shift, mainly. The computer might have a fairly good idea of where the lifts are needed and when, and would predict all but the plot-dictated movements of our adventurous main characters. For those, it would keep a suitable reserve of lifts and routes available.

Thus, the system would only hiccup when something really unexpected happened. Such as Saavik pressing "hold" in ST2, meaning the Chief Medical Officer would have to do a rare wait.

There would probably also exist "contingency" plans for things like evacuation or red alert or hostile boarding or diplomatic reception, with the computer always staying one step ahead of the lift users.

In Season One there are turbolift call buttons (up or down) on the left side of the turbolift door, which Kirk used in the second pilot WNM. After that I have thus far not been able to see these being used.
At least these should somehow signal the waiting passenger how long it will take for the next cabin to arrive.

There are also incidents when Captain Kirk enters the cabin, pulls the handle to say where he wants to go and releases the handle while turning around. I presume pushing (go down) or pulling (go up) the handle is also some sort of manual instruction / override. In EI Spocks tells the turbolift to get to "deck 2" to bring the Romulan Commander to her quarters. I believe he was pushing the handle down to let the ship's computer know he was referring to "engineering deck 2".

...Which would be an odd location for guest quarters, but perhaps a logical one for a dungeon and torture chamber. We never really learn which fate awaits the captive.

At least these should somehow signal the waiting passenger how long it will take for the next cabin to arrive.

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Perhaps this is further proof that waiting is not a feature in a system of this sort? In a properly user-friendly system, the user standing in the corridor does not need to know anything about the movement of the lifts, any more than the passenger of a bus needs to know about the flow of fuel in the engine of the bus.